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Here at Transport Foundry we regularly use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to validate our input data and our simulation engine outputs. To make this task easier for us, we wrote an R package that downloads data from the U.S. Census Bureau directly into a user's R environment. We have published this package – censusr – on CRAN under an open-source license. We hope others can use it to streamline their analyses. Contributions to the source code are welcome on GitHub.

Use

The package works by sending a list of requested variables and a list of
geographies. The call below requests the number of households owning 0, 1, 2, 3,
or 4 or more vehicles in Wake County, North Carolina (geoid = 37183). We
specify that we want this table for 2012 5-year summary level.